Monday, July 27, 2009

614, a web-only magazine published by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, has a new issue online, dedicated to Jewish Sex ("a new look at an old act").

In this disturbing piece, Shulamit Reinharz, director of the Institute, reports that

a woman in her seventies began sharing her concern with me about the custom in her granddaughter's prep school; Jewish girls were giving Jewish boys blowjobs as bar mitzvah presents! Presumably because they've already got everything else.

I couldn't believe my ears. But then she told me that this practice is so rampant that the Reform Jewish movement has taken it on as a national policy concern. I checked that piece of information out on Google and, sure enough, there is an article to that effect dated November 19, 2005. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, addressed 4,200 people in Houston for its biennial convention and explicitly talked about oral sex and hooking up. Bravo, Rabbi Yoffie. For him the issue was that girls are "defining their worth by how they please boys." The degradation of girls flies in the face of the Reform Movement's dedication to the equality of women, he said...

at a recent bat mitzvah I asked the rabbi if he had heard about this topic. He told me his youth group leaders are complaining that this behavior exists and that his synagogue will soon be introducing a curriculum to deal with it.